The long term medical care centers are now having an increased number of customers with very particular and specific requests.
Maybe this situation is a result of trends in the western community and the preferences of the elderly population. They want to keep the aging people in homes.
The requirement of intensive care is a necessity due to their particular condition, that requires both psychiatric and medical facilities.
This is why they should be considered different from psychogeriatric nursing home occupants, who have dementia that requires nursing home attention.
The focus is on providing the best available facilities to the elderly long-term care residents with chronic mental disorder.
The core objective of medical care centers is to improve the health of elderly residents. To provide the best available care to the residents first, one must understand what that means exactly.
During the study, wellbeing is viewed as a positive judgment or sentiments regarding someone’s life. Purposely the definition of research is left open-ended to allow theories from various viewpoints.
The level of good health is often thought to be relying on certain resources. The conclusion of a theory from the year 2000 is that wellbeing is dependent on social ties. It is also found that marital status is also a crucial factor for patient care and recovery.
The long term care patients behave differently when their health is analyzed according to the predetermined methods.
In easy words, their health results are usually not good. Another community of residents is comparatively young, unmarried, and mostly have troubled behavior. The following are the specifics of this study.
Selection of literature
Some very authentic writers analyzed about 720 articles and selected the following standards for subsequent filtration.
The complete text of the research was written in Dutch or English. The subjects were aged at least 40 and above. They were diagnosed with dementia that needed elder care and included the patients in the long term and eldercare facility.
The health quality was taken into account as well. A total number of 72 cases that subjected to a disagreement were resolved with discussion.
Several references were disregarded during the process based on their titles and abstracts.
· The biggest reasons for the rejections of articles were:
· The study didn’t take into account the measure of wellbeing
· The subjects were not residents in the long term care facility
· Some of the articles were not the actual researches but references to others
· The outdated information on author and resources.
Finally, following the strict criteria, only eight articles were selected for the study of elderly residents.
Type of residence and characteristics of care
The various parts of residence and qualities of care were the factor that got extensive consideration. Living with other people or independent living was analyzed by confronting the wellbeing scores of the subjects that spent most of their time in a common living room, with the ones who lived alone in an apartment.
No such difference between the wellbeing of two categories was found. Wellbeing and independency’s relation depends on several factors.
The subgroup of non-psychotic people had a positive relationship between wellness and independence. The psychotic subgroup displayed no such behavior.
The hospitalization and health relation resulted in a very complex situation among the women of schizophrenia.
The relation between period and health got a poor rating. The change of location didn’t have a bad impact on the subjects.
This result was obtained by moving various subjects from large psychiatric facilities to smaller-scale nursing homes.
Diagnosis of chronic mental disorder residents
The experts found out a negative relation between the health of the subject and the depression. The patients with anxiety, depression, or both were part of the study.
They found out that the patients suffering from depression and anxiety both had less chance of wellbeing as compared to a patient who had only anxiety.
The same scenario was analyzed between long term residents and nursing home habitats. Zero changes were observed among the psychiatric and nursing home residents. Some common symptoms of depression are given below.
· Feeling miserable, ill-tempered, or anxious
· Blank emotion, hopeless, remorseful, or useless
· Loss of desire, leisure activities or exercises, including sex
· Exhaustion and decreased energy, feeling listless
· Trouble focusing, memorizing details and making judgments
· Sleepless nights, or excessive sleeping, Rising too early
· Excessive eating or no desire to eat at all, unwanted weight increase or loss
· Dreams of death, desire to kill himself or actually doing it
· Pains, headaches, cramps, or digestive problems without a clear cause
Impact of social activities and network on chronically ill people
It was found that routine activities such as gym, shopping, or visiting friends had a positive impact on health.
However, this impact didn’t have any significance when it was adjusted for gender, age, behavioral issues, etc. After the adjustment, it even had a negative impact on the health of psychotic residents.
During the same study, the relation between the health of the subject and the network was analyzed as well. It was found that there exists a positive relationship between the network size and wellness of the subject.
People with a chronic medical condition are exposed to depression
The factors that increase the risk of depression, they also increase the risk of other medical illness. Such factors can include a family history of depression.
Maybe father, mother, or grandparents. Some risk factors can cause other illnesses as well. For instance, a change in the brain can be caused by Parkinson’s disease but sometimes these changes in the brain play a key role in getting depressed.
Similarly, an illness that causes anxiety may also cause some unwanted changes, that would result in showing symptoms of depression. Usually, the depression can be related to some irrecoverable chronic illness from below:
· Alzheimer’s disease
· HIV/AIDS
· Parkinson’s disease
· Systemic lupus erythematosus
· Rheumatoid arthritis
· Cancer
· Coronary heart disease
· Diabetes
· Epilepsy
· Multiple sclerosis
· Stroke
The patients suffering from a chronic mental disorder need very special care and attention. To provide them the best environment, it is of utmost importance to first understand their behavior under certain conditions.
The researchers have done a considerable effort to uncover the truth regarding this topic. This study will be considered a milestone for the years to come.